So it turns out that roads don’t cross each other in the Upper Peninsula. I discovered this when I decided to wander my way in the general direction of Munising to see waterfalls, with no real timeline or plan except to be back on Mackinac Island when I had to be at work again. I just kept going north, figuring I’d turn west on the next road. That road didn’t exist until Lake Superior appeared in front of me, & then it turned out to be a horrible, rutted logging road that I could only go about 10mph on lest it shake my car to pieces. The first civilization I came to was Grand Marais, a good 45 miles east of Munising.

A rock cairn on the end of a log, laying on a sandy beach. Grand Marais, MI, USA. Shutterstock: 170626277 R 209895982 iStock: 32980278 Bigstock: 76889864

Grand Marais is nice though. I got to see the Pickle Barrel House, I had the beach pretty much to myself (although I didn’t go swimming – Lake Superior stays about 55° year-round & I’m not crazy). I did get to hike out to a waterfall & to some sand dunes in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. All in all it was a nice little weekend jaunt, just not the one I had in mind when I started.

St. Petersburg is one of a handful of pretty little cities out on the peninsula between Tampa Bay & the Gulf of Mexico. With beautiful beaches & palm-lined streets it’s been a tourist destination since the beginning of tourism.

The Museum of History is on the approach to the St. Petersburg Pier, which juts out into Tampa Bay & is currently closed for construction. It’s a small but interesting museum, $15 for adults, $12 for seniors, $9 for children, military, & students (this was the first place I got a discount with my student ID!). Their permanent exhibits include an Egyptian mummy, general area history, aviation, a few signs about pirates, and for some reason two rooms filled with nothing but autographed baseballs. When I went in April they had a shipwreck exhibit on that showed models & artifacts as well as the technology involved in finding the wrecks & retrieving small bits from them.

Egyptian sarcophagus.

Some kind of crazy flying machine.

Somebody really loves baseball…

Hiding money in a bra!

Shipwreck artifacts – cemented together coins.

Shipwreck artifacts – gaming pieces?

Shipwreck artifacts – coins & a plate fragment.

Shipwreck artifacts – gold bars & plate fragments.

Model of the paddlewheeler Republic. The screen behind has an interactive program to explore the wreck through videos & high-res photos.

Just around the corner is the Museum of Fine Arts ($17/adults, $15/seniors/military, $10/children/students), which holds many works from some of history’s greatest artists in its permanent collection. After viewing ancient pieces from all over the world, I found myself in the presence of three genuine Monets. Unlike most art museums, they welcome photography in their permanent collections.

I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned my absurd love of fairs. Maybe it’s my Midwest upbringing, but I LOVE FAIRS. All kinds: local, county, state, whatever. I love everything about them. I love baby animals and prize-winning chickens and little kids showing pygmy goats. I love gussied-up llamas and livestock judges waxing poetic about cows and fancy horses with braided manes. I love midways and overpriced rides and smells of awful fried food and obnoxious barkers trying to get people to play their ridiculous games. I love expo halls full of craft booths and tables covered with handouts about bugs. I love handmade quilts with ribbons pinned on them and dioramas with model trains running around the edge and forestry exhibitions of endangered animals. I love ugly but lovable elementary-school art projects and musicians demonstrating mountain dulcimers. I love samples of local honey and displays of exotic fish and barns full of rabbits.

Cracker Country, the only living history museum in Florida.

A tiny, old-timey baseball game.

I have no idea what this is. I just call it the ‘Murica room.

Teeny tiny cows.

Teeny tiny goats.

I just really, really, really love fairs, and the Florida State Fair is one of the best I’ve been to. I saw the Budweiser Clydesdales, fed a butterfly, and watched a woman weave cloth with a wooded loom. I tasted ice cream some guy made as part of a demonstration to get people to buy some contraption or other. I found out that Florida has a special kind of horse called a Cracker that does a funny little trot and saw a kid get hauled over to a hay bale by a goat he was trying to show. I watched people feed carrot sticks to giraffes. I spent seven hours looking at wooden clocks and bonsai trees and recycled yard art. It was great.

Round Island is part of Hiawatha National Forest, is entirely uninhabited, and really doesn’t have any tourism to speak of. Occasionally someone will take a kayak across the channel, or we’ll see a bonfire on the beach, but for the most part it’s pretty forlorn, the lighthouse locked up tight, nobody around. One day a year the Round Island Lighthouse Preservation Society, together with Boy Scout Troop 323 of Freeland, Michigan, open it up for tours. The tour itself is free, but if you don’t have your own way across transportation from Mackinac costs $15. First they put seven people into a smallish fishing boat, then they transferred us into two inflatable Zodiac rafts. I wish I’d been wearing lighter pants, I was siting right in the bow and my jeans didn’t get dry the whole time I was there.

Waiting on the dock we are joined by some geese hoping for handouts.

The Zodiac.

Round Island Lighthouse

Nobody really took care of it from the time it was decommissioned in 1958 until a storm swept away a whole corner of the building in 1972, and people started to realize they might lose it forever. They kept it from collapsing then but the interior is still in desperate need of reconstruction. Holes in the walls, holes in the floors, but it’s a beautiful building. Boy Scouts throughout the building talked about the history all the way up. The first floor housed the two massive compressors that created steam to run the foghorn, the second and third floors were living quarters for the keeper, his assistant, and their families. Some of the bedrooms had the foghorn right outside the windows – I’m sure that was fun to sleep through. On the fourth floor there’s just a ladder up into the lantern room, and from there a tiny hatch opening out onto the deck.

Compressor used to create steam for the foghorn.

The rounded ceiling of the compressor room helped minimize noise in the living quarters directly above.

Handcarved details in the stairwell.

Stairways going up.

Looking back toward Mackinac. The rooms just inside from the foghorn were once bedrooms. Good luck sleeping through that!

The ceiling of the lantern room.

The fresnel lens in the lantern room.

The tiny hatch that gives access to the deck from the lantern room.

Looking out over the rest of Round Island.

While I was there a woman named Gertie came to the island. She’s 90 years old, and her father was once the lighthouse keeper. She spent a handful of summers living here as a girl, and sat for a long time telling us about carrying water up from the lake, the things her sisters found walking the beach, and making whatever fun you could in such a lonely place. We moved into what had once been her bedroom, and while she spoke a floorboard broke out from under her daughter’s foot.

Going inside Round Island Light is a rare opportunity, and one that I passed up too many times. I probably spend three hours wandering through it and listening to Gertie’s stories. It would be nice to see it restored someday, but the money and effort involved with such an undertaking may be too much. In the meantime we’ll just have to love it as a beautiful ruin.

Drive an hour from St. Ignace, to the very eastern corner of the Upper Peninsula, onto the Drummond Islander IV in De Tour Village, and land in paradise.

Paradise with nobody in it.

Paradise with cool abandoned stuff.

Paradise with lots of trees & wildflowers.

Seriously.

Ferry passage for a car and the driver is only $14. It was shocking how much stuff they put on that boat – cars towing boats, fifth-wheel campers, I even saw a semi towing a huge excavator waiting to board. I spent two nights at the semi-rustic Township Park campground, a spot with electricity is $16/night. The first night I couldn’t sleep, so I laid awake listening to loons call. Bring a canoe or kayak if you’ve got one, there’s all sorts of little outlying islands, including Harbor Island National Wildlife Refuge. There’s also plenty of hiking and four-wheeling trails. A lot of roads on the map unfortunately are signed as private roads, so I couldn’t explore as much as I wanted to :(. There’s no shortage of services here, the main intersection in town has a grocery store, hardware store, and dry goods shop that all seem to be owned by the same family, and there’s plenty of restaurants, hotels, and campgrounds. I think the gas station had as wide a variety as our grocery store here on Mackinac.

11:00 am – I leave my house with an empty duffle bag intending to catch an 11:30 Star Line ferry to Mackinaw City, and from there to the Wal-Mart in Cheboygan to stock up on groceries. There’s not a lot of options on the island so most residents make these trips occasionally.

11:16 am – I arrive on the dock and join a conglomeration of lines along with a bazillion other people. It’s pouring rain so even though it only took me a few minutes to walk through town, my duffle and I are both soaked.

11:28 am – We’re supposed to leave in two minutes and the boat hasn’t even arrived from the mainland yet.

11:40 am – The 11:30 part 1 boat departs. Since there’s 800 gajillion people trying to take this boat and nobody wants to sit on the exposed top decks because of the weather they’ve actually sent a second boat, but it’s not here yet so I’m still standing in the rain.

11:48 am – I finally board the ferry that was supposed to leave eighteen minutes ago.

11:55 am – The 11:30 part 2 boat casts off.

12:00 pm – Some guy starts clapping & singing, trying to get everyone else to join in. I find myself desperately missing the boats that only have a handful of locals on them, where everyone is basically asleep.

12:33 – I debate briefly how best to reach my car. Star Line has a shuttle service, but there’s a lot of people who also want to take it so it might be faster just to walk. In the end the rain & cold win out and I board the van, telling the driver where I’m going.

12:45 – The shuttle driver has dropped off everyone else, I think I must be next but he appears to be driving in circles. He’s going through all of Star Line’s outlying lots, so I figure he’s looking for other people to pick up as he makes his way to my destination.

12:50 – The driver stops to pick up someone, as he gets back on from bringing in her luggage he turns to me & says “I’m sorry, was I supposed to drop you off somewhere?”

12:55 pm – I reach my car, fully two hours after I first left the house.

2:30 pm – Having finished my shopping, I park my car and call for the shuttle to bring me back to the dock. I had debated with myself here as well, but I wanted to make the 3:00 boat and it was still raining, so I decided again not to walk.

2:50 pm – I call the shuttle again, as nobody ever came the first time.

2:55 pm – The shuttle finally arrives. It only takes a couple of minutes to get back through town and since the last boat left so late I figure I’ll probably still make it. The shuttle stops to pick up someone else; when I ask if we’ll make the 3:00, the driver says we will.

3:02 pm – The shuttle pulls up to the dock right at the moment the boat is pulling away from it. I watch it disappear into the fog, wondering why they this departure had to be the only one to ever leave on time and if my frozen food will still be frozen by the time I get it home.

3:15 pm – I rescue my cookies from my duffle bag so they won’t be obliterated by having a bunch of other people’s stuff thrown on top of them.

3:45 pm – I board the returning ferry and take a seat next to a window, the sill of which contains a puddle of rainwater and approximately 1,387 dead bugs. Water keeps dripping on me but at that point I couldn’t get any wetter so I keep my seat.

4:04 pm – After an hour sitting around listening to Star Line employees gossip about Tinder and wondering if my glass jars of spaghetti sauce will still be intact after being manhandled by the luggage crew, I am finally heading back across the Straits.

4:25 pm – Having reached the island I find my bag buried under two others. It’s not raining anymore but it’s still cold, and rather than park the luggage carts in the shelter they’ve left them out on the wet dock in the wind. Aside from the couple of hotel porters milling around snagging the handful of pieces going to their respective properties, nobody is doing anything to take the luggage off or see that people get their bags. I end up chucking the top bags off myself to get my stuff and get out of there. By some miracle my food is still intact and relatively frozen.

St. Louis is, weirdly enough, the only city I’ve ever been in where I saw an actual tent community on an empty lot. It’s also the only city I’ve ever been in where entire buildings were painted with murals and Roman columns.

The Gateway Arch

For anyone unfamiliar with St. Louis, the Arch is exactly that: a gigantic steel structure randomly sticking up from the bank of the Mississippi, holding up nothing. It’s actually part of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, which also includes the nearby Old Courthouse. They’re doing some work on the museum underneath the Arch, so until that reopens the Courthouse is acting as the museum/visitor’s center/ticketing location. I opted for the Arch + river cruise combo for $25 ($22 with a NPS pass). After checking out the incredible dome and somewhat comical dioramas in the Courthouse I hopped aboard the not-so-imaginatively named Becky Thatcher for a narrated 1-hour trip up & down the Mighty Mississippi. Our captain told us some of the history of the area and pointed out some interesting things along the way, including river traffic, abandoned buildings, and a casino that filled its basement with river water to comply with the law that all casinos must be “on the river”. I guess it works.

The park between the Old Courthouse & the Arch.

Approaching the Arch from the Old Courthouse.

Inside the dome of the Old Courthouse.

I don’t know what this guy is drinking, but I don’t think it’s water.

Western exploration map in the museum.

The Becky Thatcher.

Gateway Arch from the river.

One of many bridges spanning the Mississippi.

Disembarking from the boat, I headed back up the Grand Staircase (being sure to find the 33rd one, the high-water mark of past flood) and headed down into the heart of the Arch. Getting in here only costs $3, but while the museum is out of commission there’s really only the documentary movie. The cool thing to do is to head to the observation deck on the weirdest elevator ride in town, up through the leg of the Arch itself ($10). The elevators are these crazy little round pods with 5 seats that tilt & ratchet themselves along with the leaning leg of the arch, with windows in the doors that offer a great view of the inner workings of the building. The visitor’s center in the Courthouse has a sample one set up for anybody who’s not sure if they can handle the confined space. It takes 4 minutes to get to the top, but only 3 to get back down (yay gravity!), and they run about every ten minutes. The view from the top is of course spectacular, with one side facing out over the city and the other across the river into Illinois. I stayed up there for a long time watching people and cars, and looking for whatever little oddities I could spot. Click here for a short video I shot on the way down. (It’s not the greatest, but hey.)

Inside the elevator pods – maybe not for the claustrophobic.

Elevator pod in the visitor’s center.

You can actually see the windows of the observation deck from the ground.

On the way to the elevator I started wondering if I had made a wrong turn into a service area, but no, it’s just that open and bunker-like.

Entry to the elevator pods is super creepy.

630 feet in the air.

St. Louis Zoo

The zoo itself is free, but they charge a huge amount for parking in the lots. I was lucky enough to find a single open spot on the street that I didn’t have to pay for. It’s a surprisingly nice zoo for not costing anything. I only had time and energy to cover about half of it. I really liked the insect house, although I was careful to avoid the employee walking around with a hissing cockroach asking people if they wanted to pet it. One of the coolest things was a display of ants: they had the ant nest on one side of the box and the food on the other side, with a winding vine in between that the ants walked on. I could have stared at them for hours, going back and forth with their little leaf pieces. I also enjoyed the indoor penguin habitat (bring a jacket, the climate is for the penguins, not the humans!) and the seal tunnel. There’s a train ride through the zoo ($5) that I didn’t go on but I’m sure it’s fun.